The peculiarities of a realist

Fine just the way it is: Wyoming stories by Annie Proulx

The realism of Annie Proulx’s fiction is an extraordinary phenomenon. Realism in a novel has never been the same thing as plausibility, and her novels and short stories are full of bizarre and unforeseen events. The violent extremity of a great deal of her narratives sometimes verges on the territory of urban myth rather than anything recognizable as everyday life, and she enjoys characters considerably beyond the ordinary territory of the grotesque. A roll-call of her characters’ names suggests some of the fantastic strangeness of her fictional world: Freda Beautyrooms, LaVon Fronk, Rope Butt, Ruby Loving (a man), Hefran Wardrip, and a whole family named after musical instruments, of whom we hear of aunts Viola, Lutie, Banjie, and uncles Xylo and Tam (presumably –bourine). We are not, it seems, in Kansas any more.

And yet she is a densely realist writer. She wants to know exactly how the world is put together, and she evokes it not with broad strokes, but with an immense number of informed, exact, and often technical specifics. The three-page acknowledgements at the beginning of her best novel, That Old Ace in the Hole is a thing of wonder to find prefacing a work of fiction:

Thanks to Arlene Paschal for her explanations of irrigation equipment…Laura van Campenhout…helped with Dutch windmill phrases…Clinton Davis’s knowledge of the turn of the century local business of raising broomcorn…to Mike McKinney…for a lucid and clear explanation of the technique of floodwater recovery of oil…Ed Day gave a fine exhibition of flint knapping (deleted in the final version)…Ruth Erikson was good company at an Oklahoma cockfight.

As Bromo writes to Bob Dollar in That Old Ace, ‘the broadly engaged mind is the source of a happy life’ — surely a sentiment that the author would endorse.